What did it feel like to be Pope Benedict XVI? In the last week, as he has gone around making his farewells to the clergy of the diocese, and to the wider church outside St Peter's at his final audience this morning, he has given a couple of remarkable glimpses of his world.

The church, he said this morning, is "not an organisation, not an association for religious or humanitarian goals, but a living body, a community of brothers and sisters in the body of Jesus Christ, who unites us all. We experience the church in this way and could almost be able to touch it with our hands, the very power of his truth and love is a source of joy, in a time when many people speak of it as in decline."

This was, he says, what the church really is, and he saw it in the "many letters from ordinary people who … do not write to me as they write to a prince or a great [personage] one does not know. They write as brothers and sisters, sons and daughters."

This is moving, but also rather worrying. Obviously popes are different, but I would not like to base my sense of family on the letters I get from strangers. And it is hard to read his praise and thanks for the cardinals who run the Vatican when you bear in mind the venomous intrigues, the corruption, and the simple inefficiencies revealed by the Vatileaks correspondence.

Popes are obviously in the business of seeing the reality of the world beyond its appearance. But the reality that Benedict thinks he discerns is always the view from inside a church completely loyal to his teachings. It's obvious that the church of which he is pope is as much an organisation and an association for religious or humanitarian goals as it is a mystical body. And, given that the pope's job is to run the organisation and to inspire the members of the association, it is a bit worrying, a bit like Rowan Williams, that he thinks neither of those aspects deal with anything real. Williams came to regard the institutional side of his job as loathsome but I don't think he ever thought it was an illusion: a nightmare, perhaps, but not just a dream.

The same preference for redefining "reality" to exclude all the nasty bits was even more absurdly on show in his farewell remarks to the clergy of Rome last week, when he contrived to explain away all of the changes that he disliked which stemmed from the second Vatican council as resulting from the "council of the media" rather than the "Council of the Fathers", which was what he remembered attending.

You can blame the media for a lot of things, but Benedict ended up blaming them for the ghastly translations of liturgy into modern languages. That really is grotesque. It was Catholic bishops and their advisers who wrote dull English, and Vatican bureaucrats who made it worse and duller. No doubt Polly Toynbee would have done her damnedest if she'd been asked to help, but this was an entirely self-inflicted wound.

In fact, he went on to blame the "council of the media" for almost everything: it "created many calamities, so many problems, so much misery, in reality: seminaries closed, convents closed, liturgy trivialised … and the true council has struggled to materialise, to be realised: the virtual council was stronger than the real council."

It is already an article of faith among Catholic conservatives that it was the reforms of the council that led to the paedophile crisis.

No doubt Benedict is a personally modest man. But this is a breathtakingly hubristic vision of the church's role and its ability to decide what's real or not. I remember the epitaph of the Bush presidency: "we're an empire now: we create our own reality". I remember, too, how that worked out. Perhaps the epitaph on Benedict's work will be that he really believed the Roman Catholic church could create its own reality.